The Press Kit a Programmer Will Actually Open

A programmer with two hundred other submissions open in tabs and a journalist who already said yes to covering the film aren't the same reader. Same document, different reasons for opening it — and a press kit built to impress the second one is often the wrong document for the first. Sundance programmers have said as much themselves: fancy press kits aren't necessary, and the time pressure of a festival's intake period means the film is doing almost all of the convincing. The press kit that gets out of the way fastest is the one that gets opened twice.

The Six Things We Actually Pack

The list doesn't change much from film to film, on purpose. A reader who has to relearn where things live in a press kit is a reader who closes it. The standard components are a short synopsis in three lengths, a trailer plus one or two clips with direct links (not a password-walled folder three clicks deep), ten to fifteen stills in high resolution, cast and crew bios, a festival and awards list kept to one page, and a password-protected screener. For anything addressed to a programmer specifically, the screener link moves to the top. They're not reading a press kit to decide whether to watch the film — they're reading it while deciding whether they can get through forty more submissions this week.

We've packed this wrong before. On one submission we led with a two-page director's statement and buried the screener link in a footer. What we learned: a document written to be read in order and a document written to be scanned are not the same document. That one didn't get past the first pass — it's part of what we now flag in what we learned from one bad festival submission.

The Credit Block We Check Twice

The director's statement and the credit block do different jobs, and neither one is for the programmer. The statement is for press, written to explain intent after someone has already watched the film and wants a quote. The credit block is a trust document. Who decides what goes on it is a studio-level question we return to on every project, not a formatting afterthought. A press kit that opens with eight paragraphs about who made the film, before it says anything about the film itself, tells the reader where the studio's attention actually went. As one industry note on EPKs puts it, a bad press kit tells you almost nothing about the film and everything about the people involved in making it.

The stills and behind-the-scenes material in a press kit have a shooting window, and it closes with the crew. We log usable stills during the shoot now — not because every film needs a press kit on day one, but because the alternative is reconstructing a gallery from footage after a festival says yes, and footage frames rarely hold up as stills. It's a small discipline that belongs with the rest of our sound and picture logging. Cheaper done once, during production, than reassembled under a submission deadline.